From the experience of the Great Hanshin-Awaji Earthquake and the Great East Japan Earthquake, a variety of researches and developments about a response in case that a natural disaster occurs, have been promoted. Among them, especially as the fact which became apparent from the experience of the Great East Japan Earthquake, it was found that there were so many people who had been visited by being engulfed by tsunami and the like while conducting confirmation of the safety of close persons using mobile phones and smartphones. That is, in case that a natural disaster occurs, many people would put confirmation of the safety of close persons before their own evacuation, which results in a problem of expanding damage.
Along with such a problem, the importance of “initiative evacuees” has been also discussed in recent years. That is, if there is such a person who takes initiative and evacuates, people around such a person also start to evacuate therewith, so that evacuation is put before safety confirmation and it is possible to prevent the damage from spreading. That is, not applying only to the action of evacuation, it has been found that, when someone takes the initiative to perform predetermined actions, there are many people who are urged by those actions and take similar actions.
Here, techniques as shown in Patent Literatures 1 and 2 are disclosed as techniques relating to safety confirmation. The technique as shown in Patent Literature 1 includes a center computer, which is provided with: a personal information storage unit 15 that stores personal information; a group information storage unit 12 that stores group information to which the personal information belongs; a disaster victim data storage unit 9 that stores disaster victim data transmitted from an input device; a safety inquiry data reception unit 10 that receives safety inquiry data including personal information of the disaster victim; a group search unit 11 that searches, based on the personal information and the group information included in the safety inquiry data, a group to which the personal information belongs; and a safety information response unit 14 that replies, based on member information belonging to the searched group and the disaster victim data, safety data of the members.
The technique as shown in Patent Literature 2 includes an information processing apparatus 10, which: goes into a quake mode by acquisition of disaster information such as Earthquake Early Warning to be issued when a large-scale disaster occurs; extracts designated information (phone number, for example) required when obtaining safety confirmation information from a disaster information processing server 40, from a telephone book and the like stored in a mobile terminal 30 connected, based on a predetermined condition; obtains the safety confirmation information from the disaster information processing server 40 using the designated information; extracts personal information (such as name and phone number of an owner of the mobile terminal) which can be registered as the safety confirmation information from the connected mobile terminal 30 to the disaster information processing server 40, based on a predetermined condition; and registers the extracted personal information in the disaster information processing server 40 as the safety confirmation information.
Further, such a technique as Twitter™ that posts and delivers one's own comments and the like to many and unspecified persons and/or particular persons has been commonly used in recent years.